Moe

A story in today's Journal about a bunch of workplace sex discrimination lawsuits filed against EMC, a data storage company (fun fact: data storage = causing some problems for us today!) got us all a-body-spasming. We thought it was bad when one of those Wal-Mart managers had surreptitiously taken employees to a strip clubs! Well, at EMC, they got the strippers to paint "EMC" on their ass cheeks. In one lawsuit, filed by a longtime executive at the company, the boss man decides to perform some exotic tricks on a dancer hired to entertain a company event.

...a stripper was hired to come to the hotel where a company meeting was being held to celebrate the promotion of two managers. Ms. Nelson left the room and waited in the hallway, her lawsuit said. While waiting there, she heard male salesmen who left the room saying that her "boss licked whipped-cream off the strippers' breasts," her complaint said.

WHY IS IT MALE BOSSES THINK THIS SHIT IS OKAY? We polled our friends. Interestingly, about half of them had no bad work stories whatsoever; the other half had mooore than enough to compensate.

I once had a boss who'd chew out his (silent) wife in front of me; another liked to walk around shirtless, "tackle" female employees in the hallways and give his female assistants pet names synonymous with "Retard." Naturally, the environment came straight from the top; I just ran into a girl who told me that old boss's boss had recently instructed her to take off her coat so he could inspect her outfit, only to instruct her to wear something tighter, with higher heels. This girl was an editor, for fuck's sake. But none of this shit is even so bad; it's the notion that women can't be smart - or that women who are smart are thereby "crazy" "divas" - that usually accompanies it that is the worst. A policy wonk friend of ours had a graduate school internship wherein she was required to trim the edges off newspaper clippings for one of the policy analysts; her current job isn't much better. A certain Jezebel intern used to work for a publisher who asked her to "remove splinters from his hand and share his distaste for the plain looking fat-ish girls at the magazine." He also made her fetch him cappuccino every hour and "slapped his secretary's ass once in awhile," while he kept all real business from the female editors and assigned "the random man who was like the office manager" to do all the editorial work. Another (Jewish) friend had a boss who told the charming joke "How do you get a Jewish girl to stop fucking?" (Answer: Marry her. Ha!) And a friend of ours who was lucky enough to get her own ass slapped waiting tables at the poker room at the Golden Eagle Country Club in Tallahassee, Florida actually complained about it — after which only male servers were allowed to work the poker room. Anyway, in case you didn't get it — don't feel bad, the thickest girls have the nicest racks! wink — this is your repository for sexist boss stories. As long as you're still at work, you might as well give them up.